Bøger af Jo Fox

On an autumn afternoon in 1980, Jenna Schuler finally understands why, for the past ten years, The Hans Brunner Gallery has refused to accept her paintings into their annual Emerging Artists Show. In fact, since graduating from art school with honors, she hasn't been able to interest any gallery in showing her work. Jenna has an idea of how to change all that. On the sidewalk near her studio rests a large cardboard box. She knocks on the carton and inside, finds a down-and-out Viet Nam Vet named Tanner Trusk. Nearby, Michael Katz and his albino assistant Dirtman, run an extortion ring that commandeers earnings from San Francisco panhandlers including Tanner Trusk. Katz has problems too. Someone is siphoning off part of the funds before he can get to them. Meanwhile, someone is altering the city's billboards, an urban cowboy is rising to fame, government funding for the poor has gone missing and people are falling in love. The Surrogate's characters work to resolve their problems within an atmosphere of misogyny and greed, homelessness and the scars of war, prejudice and poverty. They learn the power of artistic expression, friendship and social activism during a time that mirrors our own.

The Artists Touch is a collection of ten stories which, examine the terrain upon which Art meets the marketplace. Painters, sculptors, and craftsmen interact with dealers, critics and collectors over issues of artistic integrity and free market values. Against this background, a painter walks the fine line between optimism and denial, a sculptor is presented with the opportunity to sell out, and a young critic undergoes a rite of passage "according to the Oedipal Rule."

A young couple named Sonia and Gary Carter participate in anti-war demonstrations in Chicago's Grant Park during the summer of 1968, and are caught in a police riot. They are tear-gassed, Gary is beaten and Sonia is dragged down a sidewalk by her hair. Separately, each makes a life-altering decision: she, to become a pacifist and move to the country, and he to become a revolutionary and join the Weathermen Underground. Together, Sonia and Gary drop out of urban life and begin a homestead in Vermont. Gary hides fugitives for the Weathermen, frees Timothy Leary from prison and sets off bombs. Sonia plants a vegetable garden, meets a hippie news herald, a sinister snowplow operator, a mad donkey breeder, and a sadistic goat. She falls in love with a poet-carpenter who is helping them build their house and struggles with the decision of whether to leave a marriage that is crumbling. Idealism versus anarchy, utopianism verses establishmentarianism, and commitment verses love, are a few of the issues Sonia and Gary work their way through during the end of the tumultuous and creative sixties.

Exploring shades of right and wrong, transgression and forgiveness, romance and betrayal, love and hate, Uses of Deception will lead you to question what it is that you believe is moral and true.

Rena Basch is an administrative assistant at a San Francisco law firm. She is a single parent with a sick child. Her six-year-old daughter needs open-heart surgery and home nursing care. In order to raise money for the nurse, Rena takes on a second job as a gestational carrier. Rena signs a contract to become implanted with a fertilized egg and to deliver the baby to its genetic parents. She finds herself in trouble when she discovers she is pregnant with twins and under threat to keep the paternity of the second fetus a secret. In the process of solving the problem of what to do with an extra baby, Rena makes new friends, finds love, discovers her calling as a baker, and mends her relationship with her father. As her babies grow she develops into a stronger woman, one who knows her own mind and can stand up for what she believes. Covering in-vitro-fertilization, surrogacy, body image, questions of abortion versus choice, rape, pornography, multi-generational families, single parenting, and LGBT families, By Heat And Hand spans many contemporary topics without taking a stance. This is the story about our shifting, multiple identities and how a woman finds her strength through contemplating her body and the development of life inside it.

It's June In Miami is a collection of fifteen interlocked short stories involving four Miami Families over a forty year period: The Sterns, a Jewish American family, the Mertens, a Haitian American family, the Marti-Surazes, a Cuban American family, the Rothkopf's a retired Ohio gangster's family, and their African American help. In each story, a chance meeting with someone from a different background, often a character from another story in the book, causes the characters' lives to change. Against a setting painted in vivid tropical colors, the first generation flees poverty, abuse, revolution, the holocaust, and the repeal of the Volsted Act. They eagerly embrace the American Dream while the second generation, growing up in the sixties, find themselves realists who struggle with the painful consequences of their parent's pasts. June In Miami is about fate and agency, deception and truth, love and survival, fear and forgiveness.